Clarke MacArthur couldn’t really believe what he was seeing, but in a way, he could.

With the troubles he and linemates Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolai Kulemin have had scoring recently, it only made perverse sense that MacArthur put the puck in his own net during a 5-2 loss against the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night.

“It was a slow, painful watch all the way down the ice,” MacArthur said. “Thank God it was not a one-goal game, because it would have hurt even more. Those things happen.”

The Leafs, down 4-2, had their net empty. MacArthur corralled the puck at the hash marks on the side boards in the Senators’ end and tried to pass it to defenceman Carl Gunnarsson, who was on the blue line.

“I looked down just to make sure I still had (the puck), and as soon as I did, he was jumping toward the net and I was throwing it out to (where Gunnarsson had been),” MacArthur said. “That was the first time for sure in the NHL (that he has shot the puck into his own net). Maybe some have gone off me, but never where I just fired it home.”